author : Tom Cool

Books

Books : reviews

Tom Cool.Infectress.
Baen. 1997

Infectress is a deadly eco-terrorist, determined to engineer New Age
Dawn, a virus that will kill most people on earth, restoring the world to
an idyllic past state. Diane Jamison is an ex-FBI agent with a good reason
to stop her. And Scott McMichaels has just invented Meta, an AI that may
be powerful enough to design New Age Dawn. When Infectress gets control of
Meta, the race is on to stop the ultimate disaster.

The pace rarely lets up: Diane puts together tenuous clues to
Infectress' identity and ultimate goal, and discovers to what lengths she
is truly willing to go in her hunt; Scott invents Meta, then discovers the
hard way that full-immersion virtual reality (VR) is the most
sophisticated torture invented; Infectress comes close to her aim, but
still has to convince her impatient sponsor not to kill her. We are shown
a grimy, overcrowded Earth, with the aim of making Infectress' goal seem
not totally unreasonable. But her means truly are dreadful.

The plot is good fun. But what makes this good hard SF is the
all the great technology. It is 2025: we have a newly created super AI,
fully decoding the human genome and designing super viruses; we have
nanotech 'roaches' invading computer systems and human brains; we have
smart spider-sized multi-robots; we have total immersion VR almost
indistinguishable from reality. Cool manages the non-intrusive info-dump
as well as Heinlein ever did: how can some authors manage to make a page
of high tech hardware specs exciting to read, and flow with the plot,
while others make it dull, or jarring? The detailed descriptions of the VR
system, with the intelligent all-body 'data-gloves' and exoskeletons is
particularly fascinating. When VR becomes so good you can't distinguish it
from reality, when you might never know whether your experiences are
illusions or reality, things will certainly be very different.

Infectress reminds me in some ways of Greg
Bear's Queen of Angels (though not as good, but then again,
not as difficult to read), with some of the well-drawn future style of
Peter Hamilton's Mindstar Rising

Tom Cool.Secret Realms.
Tor. 1998

A group of youngsters have been raised from birth in total immersion
virtual reality -- trained only to fight battles, ignorant of the real
world. But some of them have had suspicions for a while, and when the real
war that they have been trained to fight breaks out, they notice a
difference from the earlier virtual wars, and use their skills to fight
their jailers.

I found the scenes in VR the most interesting, as the warriors
manipulate their virtual landscapes fighting old battles in new ways. The
way they treat the real world as just one more realm, with different rules
but with experiences no more or less meaningful than their VR ones, is
interesting. I did find some of the abilities of the warriors in real life
a little unbelievable, however -- true, they are used to flipping between
different VR realms, but this is the first time they have ever interacted
with new different people, yet they seem to have little difficulty
adapting.

The plot is a little choppy occasionally, flipping between several
viewpoints, and the character of Mike is a little underdeveloped --
sometimes he seems to be there just to illustrate scenes of life on an
American aircraft carrier. But Trickster and Cat are well-drawn, and
bringing out the contrasts and similarities of the warriors' totally
artificial lives with the "normal" use of VR on the aircraft
carrier is a nice touch.